Twitter Race: Which Candidate (or Bashing) Will Win?

Sandhya Kambhampati
sjkambhampati@gmail.com
@sandhya__k

With the release of  Mitt Romney’s hidden camera video,  reporters and news outlets took to Twitter for their newscasts and coverage of the leak.

Here’s the video in case you missed it:

Source: Mother Jones 

Here are some tweets from that day:

Source: Twitter 

It's interesting to note that outlets such as Nightline use the words "political firestorm" to catch tweeters' attention, whereas reporters such as @BuzzFeedAndrew are focused on quoting the video, prompting people to speak up.

While the video bashing began to explode on Twitter, @washingtonpost  tweeted that President Obama was ahead of Romney in the swing states.

Now, it's not just a political race, but a competition for the news outlets to see who gets the news first and who can properly provide the public with access to both candidates.

During this time, there were very few tweets about President Obama.

It almost seemed as if this video made Romney the face of politics on Twitter this week.

Here are some more tweets from later on in the week: 

Source: Twitter 

While it may be important to focus on Romney and his hidden camera video, I think President Obama also needed to be given some attention.  

For one thing, he's still in office and what he's doing right now is extremely important to the election.

While Romney should feel embarrassed of what he said, constant referrals to Romney on Twitter drove his social media appearance up. 

This prompted people to disagree with his video and some to agree, making Romney's slip-up a main focus and an interesting factor to come into play before the debates. 

This brings out the super loyal Republicans and Democrats.

And so, the Twitter battle begins. 

Source: @samsteinhp

It's also interesting that Sunday, September 23rd,  both candidates appeared on 60 Minutes--head to head in competition.

Here's a look at some of the live tweets that were happening during the show.

What do you think of this Twitter coverage this #election2012 ? Tweet @sandhya__k